Exquisite Corpus: A Practical Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Creative Expression
 

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OPEN SCHOLARSHIP COMMONS, SUZZALLO LIBRARY - Google Map
Exquisite Corpus workshop by Laura Luna Castillo

This workshop, led by Assistant Professor Laura Luna Castillo (UW, DXARTS), merges computational linguistics and creative experimentation. We will use Python’s Natural Language Toolkit (NTLK) to analyze, deconstruct and algorithmically expand text corpora in a Dadaist spirit. Participants will be guided through hands-on code examples to learn techniques for data augmentation and synthetic data generation. We will explore grammatical patterns, linguistic visualizations and randomization as meaning-making tools that introduce surreal linguistic styles into a corpus, generating endless variations of source texts. This process provides insight into how Large Language Models learn and adapt to linguistic styles, albeit on a much larger scale. Time allowing, we will use our augmented corpus to fine-tune our own, rustic, language model. A laptop is required for this hands-on session.